As clearly stated, keep in mind that this is not a valid way of updating your device and that it’s not guaranteed for you although it does for most people. And it could void your warranty, as far as I know. That’s the only thing which stopped me from trying it myself at this point. I’m pretty sure that curiosity will take over any time soon though. 🙂

If either “hvdwolf” or “birdiebnl” is reading this, keep up the good work guys!

Posted
on February 27, 2011, 3:13 pm,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Android.

About two weeks ago I decided that I would like to own a tablet PC (with Android). So after a view days of in-depth research and giving things a good thought, the Archos 7 Home Tablet v2 (8GB) caught my eye. Having a tight budget (I don’t want to spend that much on something that is just a play-thing), I figured that it was the right choice for me.

With a price of ~ € 150,- euros it’s not too expensive and it’s good value for money. It does what it has been designed to do; it plays movies, can do some simple web-browsing, allows you to read E-books, runs some simple games and it can play some music. There is a more expensive Archos 7 Internet Tablet available (~ € 249,- / € 299,-) which does the about same but has a more recent Android version (Android 2.2 “Froyo”), capacitive multitouch screen, better 3D support and a better CPU. Considering I just wanted to watch some movies when traveling and being able to grab a browser when I need one, it was not worth the extra € 100,- for me.

The Archos 7 Home Tablet v2 has a 7” TFT LCD resistive touch screen running at 800×480 pixels supporting up to 16 million colors. It is powered by a 800MHz CPU (ARM9 / Rockchip RK2818) (600 MHz in v1 of the tablet) and it runs on Android 2.1 “Eclair” (v1 runs Android 1.5 “Cupcake”). It also has an Accelerometer, something the v1 model of the tablet didn’t have. It has 8GB of internal storage and can be expanded by micro SDHC. I bought mine together with a class 4, 8GB micro SDHC card from Kingston, that means plenty of space for now.

It also has one USB port which can function as a host and slave port. This means that you cannot only connect your computer to your device to transfer files and stuff but that you also can connect an external source to it such as a keyboard, mouse or external storage. Archos sells a special converter (costs around € 10,- + € 14,- shipping) for this purpose. But there is an alternative too, after reading some inspiring pages about creating such cable yourself, I got eager to create one myself. Although, I didn’t want to cut op one of my micro USB cables for that. I went looking for pre-built cables and found out that a shop in the region sells a micro USB a to USB female converter, so I went to get one. Once playing, I found out that it works perfectly fine and it cost me only € 3,- + € 0,50 for parking. It was not a problem to connect a full-size keyboard or a mouse. The tablet recognized them out of the box. So now I only need to get me a USB hub so I can connect them at the same time. 🙂

The device in general feels like it’s well built. It’s heavier than for example the larger 101 Internet Tablet (which feels, well, kind of cheap – imho). Operation is just like any other Android touch-interface device except for the fact that the tablet doesn’t have any physical buttons. Which brings me immediately to an other point, it has no support for the Google Market. You have to rely on a market called “AppsLib“. Personally I don’t think it’s the best market around. The software feels kind clumsy and the apps aren’t that exciting as the ones in the Google Market. Luckily I found out about F-Droid, a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) market for Android. It has fewer apps but then again, you cannot run that many apps anyway. I installed me a few (simple!) games, a decent E-book reader and a unit converter besides the video player, browser, music player and some other stuff which is installed by default.

Watching movies is a piece of cake, just load some (*.AVI) files onto your device and start the video player. I haven’t found anything in my (small) collection that couldn’t be played yet. Same for music, by the way. Internet uses the stock Android browser. You could install Opera or an other browser if you like. Flash is not supported, the Android version is too old. But in general, browsing works just fine and I haven’t had any problems with the sites that I visit.

My pros;

Good value for money

Play movies and music just fine

Regular web-browsing does it’s job

Can be rooted (good to know for when the warranty expires)

My cons;

Not likely to receive any official updates to newer versions of Android (or any updates at all)

It’s a resistive touch screen (motions detected by pressure) which means that it not always responds that good (capacitive screens respond to conduction which is way more accurate)

Charging seems to take a while and I think the battery life isn’t as good as advertised. I’m only in my 3th cycle though, maybe it will improve (it can easily do 1.5 hour of movie time plus around 5 days of standby though)

Well, this is it for now. I hope that this can be of any use who is considering to buy a cheap tablet. This has been my first post since a long while, from now on I am planning on posting more and regularly about Fedora, Android, (F)OSS software and photography or a combination of them.

But at least they are compatible with xorg 1.8 and that means shiny desktop effects within Fedora 13 again for me. I must admit that the nouveau driver has come a long way recently although I never got the desktop effects to run as smoothly as they do with the proprietary drivers. And therefor I’m quite happy with nVidia releasing these drivers.

Since I don’t really mind using them ( and I’m too impatient to wait for RPMFusion to include these drivers into their repository’s 🙂 ) here’s a quick guide on installing these proprietary drivers:

6. reboot to runlevel 3 (reboot, to make sure nouveau is not loaded else the nVidia drivers will fail to install)

7. find the drivers, make them executable (chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.27{-pkg0} or {-pkg1}.run) and run the installer (sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.27{-pkg0} or {-pkg1}.run) and follow the instruction.

Posted
on July 15, 2010, 8:05 am,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Planet Fedora.

Right, it has been a while since my last post. I don’t have anything else but the excuse that the real life™ caught up on me. 🙂

Anyway, a new version of rekonq has been released upstream and has now hit updates-testing for F-12 and F-13 (and let’s not forget rawhide). My last post was about version 0.3.0 and there sure have been a lot of improvements since then, you’ll find a short list below. I’m still impressed by this spiffy little browser. In my humble opinion it has everything that a browser needs. Well, perhaps not everything yet (I could use some webdevelopertools a la firebug / webdeveloper) but someone is / was working on a plug-in framework so that gives me some hope for the future. 🙂

Next version in line is going to be version 1.0, if I’m not mistaking. By then rekonq should be a mature browser with a nice set of features and most bugs would be squashed. At least 0.5.0 is an other step in the right direction.

Last weekend Orcan Ogetbil finished the review on rekonq (thanks again!). rekonq is a new web browser designed for KDE. It’s small, light-weight, built with Qt and based on WebKit. Here’s a screenshot:

rekonq WebKit KDE browser

Currently it’s queued for -testing for F-10 [1] and F-11 [2] and can be installed from rawhide right away. Just a simple “yum install rekonq” will do the trick for rawhide users. As soon as it gets pushed for F-10 and F-11 you could use “yum install rekonq –enablerepo=updates-testing”. And people who can’t wait for it to get pushed, could grab it from Koji [3]. Just download the RPM and install it the way you prefer.

This has been my first real packaging challenge and I expected to know more than I did. Anyway it has been quite a learning experience and I’m pretty sure any following releases / packages will go a lot smoother. 🙂

Thanks to the Fedora KDE SIG, KDE 4.3.1 is now located in updates. That means that you can use your favorite package manager to update to the latest version of KDE. This version of KDE brings us many improvements in the kdepim section, many Kmail bugs have been fixed. To see what’s new in KDE 4.3.1, have a look at the changelog or have a look at release announcement.

If you would like to see more of KDE in Fedora then give Kevin Kofler a vote at the FESCo Elections.

Do you want the KDE SIG to be represented in FESCo? Do you want KDE to get
treated as a first-class citizen in Fedora? Do you want to stop the
misleading abuse of the word “desktop” to mean “GNOME”? Are you fed up of
proposed censorship of things like country flags which destroys our right
to free speech and hurts KDE? Or maybe you are unhappy with the current
FESCo and want to give a chance to a new face? If so, vote for “Kevin
Kofler (Kevin_Kofler)” at the FESCo elections, starting tonight at midnight
UTC. My answers to the election questionnaire can be found here:http://fpaste.org/paste/14139

Than you should change your grub.conf a bit to make it properly work. This happens when hiddenmenu is enabled and when a timeout has been set. A known workaround is adding “verbose=0” to your grub.conf.